Author: europanomad

Rainer J. Hanshe is a writer and the founder of Contra Mundum Press and Hyperion: On the Future of Aesthetics. He is the author of two novels, The Acolytes (2010) and The Abdication (2012), and Shattering the Muses (2015), a hybrid text created in collaboration with Federico Gori. He is also the editor of Richard Foreman’s Plays with Films (2013) and Wordsworth's Fragments (2014). He has also written numerous essays on Nietzsche. His second novel, The Abdication, has been translated into Italian, Turkish (Aylak Adam: Zepelin), and Slovakian (Cloaca). Other work of his has appeared in Sinn und Form, Jelenkor, ChrisMarker.org, Asymptote, Quarterly Conversation, and elsewhere. Hanshe is currently writing two novels, Humanimality, and Now, Wonder.

some destroyed
some fragments
some broken
shattered
s-pli-t
in various stages & forms

of decay & destruction

whittled by history
whittled by time
whittled by civilization

whittled by each present

erasing each past
to create a future that never comes
but/and is only — ? — a force

of erasure

& destruction
a shattering power that opens a melancholic pathway
a force of violence & mourning
or which can give rise to each within us

thru our ability, or inability,
to countenance the merciless

shaping force of the future

TIME THE SCULPTOR
like Apollo skinning Marsyas
for his desire

to sustain primitive,

primordial powers
the sublime Entartete Künstler

degenerate?

of genesis

Is this not an unending,

ceaseless oscillation
of unified forces

which both destroy & sustain each other
in order to create yet something else

between or out of them
& their contest
It is an agon that gives birth

to a monstrum
a creature too terrifying for us to conceive
but which has to be created
against our will
& in the midst of our destruction
Hence the mourning & melancholy
but also the terrible —— terrifyingly ecstatic ——